24 April 2025
This month, we will be joining artist, writer and publisher Alec Finlay and Deputy Director Aly Barr at the Scottish Poetry Library.
Alec has published over 20books and has won a number of awards. In the 1990s he set up the Morning Star Press, producing a series of beautiful collaborative folios with artists and poets from Europe to the USA and Japan.
For this event he has selected a number of works to present exclusively to Spin. There will also be an opportunity to look as SPL’s work combining word and image and explore the realm of concrete poetry.
20 October 2010 at 6.30pm
A visit to the acclaimed New York artist Robert Barry’s exhibition, Words and Music at the Common Guild.
This exhibition comprises a new installation conceived specially for The Common Guild by one of the most influential American artists associated with the emergence of conceptual art in the late 1960 and early 1970s. Robert Barry was a pioneer of conceptual art, abandoning painting in 1967 to produce site-specific installations, many of which were almost invisible to the viewer. These installations and actions relied on language to indicate their existence, shifting the presentation and reception of the work from image to text.
Since the early 1970s, language, or perhaps more correctly, words, have been central to Barry’s practice, which has since included typewriter drawings, wall pieces, slide projections and films as well as often cited actions such as gas releases and telepathic pieces. Barry is now perhaps best known for his large-scale text installations known as word spaces, which cast a selection of words in a given space from an ongoing and ever-changing collection.
Applied directly to the walls, windows and floors of the gallery, the words surround the viewer, reasserting the importance of the viewer at the heart of the art experience. As Barry explains, ‘Instead of trying to use text to convey an idea or meaning, I became interested in the individual power of the word to convey emotions or feelings.’
Although utterly conceptual in origin, Robert Barry’s work is essentially experiential. This rare opportunity to see his work brings the physical space between the words, the gallery and the viewer into focus.
18 November 2009 at 6.30pm
Utilizing a range of media including painting, knitting and screen-printing, Ciara Phillips combines two and three-dimensional works to create installations that draw upon a diverse range of interests – from Medieval woodcuts to Memphis design. Phillips’ practice has focused on drawing parallels between various historical periods and traditions by aligning them with observations of her immediate surroundings. This, coupled with her long-standing interest in combining text and image, is reflected in her current works, which hint at a tongue-in-cheek humour whilst also soliciting serious reflection.
Phillips has developed a new body of work that investigates the relationship of the female body to language. A development of recent work in which the alphabet has been employed as a framework from which to draw formal and conceptual associations, this exhibition combines silkscreen prints, murals and sculptural elements to create an installation that invites the viewer to consider language in its conceptual, physical and material manifestations. Using the body as a basis from which to make letters, Phillips draws upon the long-standing tradition of the human alphabet and seeks to propose new arrangements that offer playful possibilities for a personal interpretation of letters and language. The work in this exhibition was developed during the summer of 2009 whilst Phillips was on residency at Cove Park, and subsequently at the Glasgow Print Studios. An essay accompanies this exhibition from writer Ellie Herring.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, based in Glasgow, Phillips studied Fine Art at Queens University, Kingston (BFA 2000) and Glasgow School of Art (MFA 2004). Recent exhibitions include: Vowelled, Glasgow Project Room (2007); Scottish Collective, with Market Gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2006); and The Clamour of Ornament, Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art 2006.
17 June 2009 at 6.30pm
Spin: Glasgow’s first visit to The Common Guild to see work by Roni Horn.
Roni Horn‘s work sets up relationships: between images, between words and between object and viewer. This new exhibition, following Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, her major show currently at Tate Modern, brings together a concise group of works that share Horn’s characteristic evocation of the fine line between sameness and difference. Specifically selected with the artist, in response to the particular characteristics of The Common Guild’s grand but domestic gallery spaces, the exhibition also demonstrates the range of forms in which Horn works – photographic installations, drawing, sculpture and books. Its title comes from the work of legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977), via a work included in the exhibition, and is suggestive of the many instances of reflection to be found in this coming together of art and place.
The Common Guild is a not-for-profit visual arts organisation, receiving Flexible Funding from the Scottish Arts Council is dedicated to producing a dynamic international programme of contemporary visual art projects, exhibitions, and events. These include gallery-based exhibitions and ephemeral, non-gallery projects, interventions and collaborations. The Common Guild’s temporary home at 21 Woodlands Terrace is a grand, Victorian townhouse to the west of the city centre next to Kelvingrove Park. Exhibitions take place over two floors, including a unique library, designed by artist Andrew Miller, which will include a selection of Roni Horn’s extensive output of artist’s books and catalogues.
Roni Horn lives and works in New York, where she was born in 1955. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited in major solo exhibitions in Europe and America including at significant institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Dia Center for the Arts, New York and most recently at Tate Modern, Collection Lambert, Avignon, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The numerous important group exhibitions in which she has participated include the Whitney Biennial exhibitions of 1991 and 2004, Documenta IX in 1992 and the 1997 Venice Biennale. She has worked on artist’s books throughout her career, including the multi-volume To Place.
